A Better Search Utility?

It’s my habit to look for an answer to my question in previous posts before posting a new one. However, this webiste’s search utility only gives the threads that a key phrase was found in, and I’m expected to go through THOUSANDS of individual posts looking for the key phrase. Ya, right.

Can you PLEASE add in a better search utility? This is about the worst one I’ve ever come across.

If you know how you can narrow it down more, you can instead click the link saying advanced search and select the tab labeled search single content type (which will give you many different fields such as searching by section and date).

No, those ‘advanced’ options don’t really help. They only allow you to reduce it by location (forums, groups, messages) and by date and user. There’s no way to narrow a search based on topic. Not even restricting it to a forum or thread. THAT would make it useable. Currently, it is useless.

You should also note that at the top of each subforum is a “Search this forum” menu item for searching the threads in that specific forum.

That said… as far as I know, all VBulletin forums share this same basic search function. This topic has come up in the past, but there really hasn’t ever been all that great of a replacement. You may have better luck using Google to search the forums. Just add “site:blenderartists.org” (without quotes) to your search terms.

I didn’t notice the forum search menu. Thanks. I do find google to be much better for finding things, but I don’t like depending on external search engines for personal reasons.

I wish to second this (if it’s possible).
At the very least, allow some AND/OR/NOT logic in advanced search. Currently if i search for, let’s say :

  • python operator
  • “python operator”
  • python + operator
  • python AND operator

all of the above returned threads where either python or operator appeared while i was trying to find a thread that explained how to get the python operators to put in custom hotkeys and, as you can guess, adding hotkey as an additional keyword made things worse (i finally found the answer, but it’s really a pain each time you need to narrow searches).

I’ve seen plenty of forums allowing AND/+ logic in searches. I don’t know whether they were vBulletin or something else, but it seems like this function is a minimum to earn the title of “search engine”.

Limiting searches inside sub-forums can help in some occasions, but not each time. What if, as a newcomer, i was seaching for “edge creasing” (hypothetical, i how to crease edges) in modelling sub-forum : i’ll get all the threads where people discuss edge splitting, edge extruding … Then i’ll ask and people will get mad at me because that’s been discussed 100th time.

External search with google is a major annoyance compared to just using the built-in search. Especially when “big G brother” isn’t your default search engine. Maybe this feature is available in those i use, i’ll see, but few people think about this.

You could do a google search with site or inurl to limit the search at the given url. This gives you all the google options. And most of the times better results than the inbuilt search engines.

The pattern to use site or inurl at Google is

inurl:http://myurl.com search term

For example,

inurl:http://blenderartists.org/forum/ a better search utility

will list you this thread as the first search result.

More search operators here: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

OK. As i said right above

I tested this with my default search engine (in fact, i added an in-site search add-on to my firefox for convenience) and yes, they have site search available but

  • Results are not sorted by date
  • Not possible to limit to a sub-forum (or not without way more hassles), in fact results are not even limited to the forum
  • Results will include search results from the forum’s built-in search!

All in all, it’s a half working workaround but not a real alternative to a good search engine.

Simply put : a site with the amount of information found here deserves a better search engine. Maybe it’s not possible (that would be sad) maybe it’s complicated (and i understand the admins are maintaining the site on their free time) but if it can be done, it would be a real improvement for the site.

Sometimes the search returns a thread that is hundreds of pages long. It would be useful to know on which page the result is.